The present study attempts to explore what kind of "personality theory" preschoolers have. For this purpose, preschoolers' understanding of characteristics in their friends' behavior was ...investigated. "Friends" in this study were defined as children of the same gender who chose each other as close companions, and "acquaintances" were those who knew each other but were not as close as friends. Twenty-four 5-year-old and twenty-eight 6-year-old children were asked how their friends would behave toward themselves and their acquaintances in various situations, such as play, help, and trust. It was found that they predicted their friends to behave more favorably to themselves than to their acquaintance in play situations, but not necessarily in other situations. The finding suggested that preschoolers understood their friends' patterns of behavior not merely based on their friends' general characteristics but on the specific personal relationship between them.
Multifactor-system theory is a general conception of the structure, dynamics, and development of individual differences in integrative personality. The structure and dynamics of individuality are ...analyzed from an information-processing conceptual framework in which personality, or the total psychological system, is conceived as a hierarchically organized composite of 6 interacting systems: sensory, motor, cognition, affect, style, and value. Each of the systems is analyzed as a multidimensional hierarchy. (28 ref)
In Part II of this 3-part series on multifactor-system theory, the part-whole problems of personality integration are analyzed in terms of factor and system interactions, decision-control processes, ...and person-situation interactions. Suprasystem or personality functioning involves both internal (i.e., type-template matching) and external (i.e., normative matching) processing simultaneously. Thus, molar psychological constructions, such as world view and life-style, are the outcomes of the integration of the style-cognitive and value-affective systems, respectively. When suprasystem norms function assimilatively, personality stability is occurring. When suprasystem norms function accommodatively, personality change is occurring. The most encompassing indicator of personality integration at a given moment is the dynamic balance between the assimilative and accommodative functioning of the total system. (19 ref)
Discusses multivariate life-span development from the standpoint of a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the ontogenesis of factors in each of 6 systems. The pattern of quantitative development ...involves growth, stability, and decline; and qualitative development involves changes in the organization of factors. Hereditary and environmental sources of variation are analyzed via the factor-gene model and the concept of heredity-dominant factors, and the factor-learning model and environment-dominant factors. It is hypothesized that the sensory and motor systems are heredity dominant, that the style and value systems are environment dominant, and that the cognitive and affective systems are partially heredity dominant. These hypotheses have been theoretically and empirically supported in studies by the 2nd author (1973, 1979). (56 ref)
Extracted terms and phrases that refer to relatively stable physical and psychological traits from Theodore Dreiser's A Gallery of Women. A measure of trait cooccurrence for each pair of traits, ...based on the proportion of times the 2 traits were attributed to the same character, was used as input for clustering and multidimensional scaling. The resulting structures are interpreted in terms of selected, independently measured properties of the traits. The most relevant properties for interpreting these trait structures are (a) sex of character, (b) conformity, (c) evaluation, and (d) potency (hard-soft). The 1st property is discussed in terms of Dreiser's involvements with women, and the 2nd in terms of his intense struggles with conformity pressures. Evaluation (which was not orthogonal to potency in this study) was relatively weak by contrast with the usual finding reported in the literature. Biographical data indicate that Dreiser was extremely evaluative in his personal life, and the weakness of this property in this book may simply reflect a novelistic style that attempts to avoid polarized impressions of the characters. Implications of these findings for identifying general dimensions of person perception are discussed. (24 ref.)
Employed a modification of the Environmental Assessment Technique to classify college faculties and curricula into the 6 types in J. L. Holland's theory of personality and vocational choice. Data ...were obtained from 1968 catalogs for 142 colleges and from 1948 catalogs for 51 colleges. Undergraduate and graduate environments were studied separately. The college profile scores were anlayzed in terms of 3 components: elevation, scatter, and shape. The profile scores do not involve student characteristics, are reliable, are related in meaningful ways to other measures of college environments, and reveal meaningful differences in the emphasis given to subject matter areas. This technique is promising for the study of college environments.
Self-guided learning products such as online education and language learning apps are pervasive in today's consumer environment. We investigate how the congruence between one's implicit theory of ...personality and the type of feedback provided to consumers influences evaluations of these products. Relying on converging evidence from one quasi-field and two experimental studies using real-life self-directed consumer contexts, we find that consumers' product satisfaction can be enhanced by providing consumers with well-tailored feedback that aligns with their implicit theory of personality. Our work uniquely suggests that advancement (how much of the task is completed) and proficiency (how well the consumer has done) feedback are not uniformly appealing to all consumers, and that not all feedback leads to more favorable product evaluations for entity and incremental theorists. Our work advances the implicit theory and consumption progress feedback literature and makes substantive recommendations to marketers who increasingly rely on consumers to navigate the learning and consumption of their offerings.
This research integrated implicit theories of personality and the biopsychosocial model of challenge and threat, hypothesizing that adolescents would be more likely to conclude that they can meet the ...demands of an evaluative social situation when they were taught that people have the potential to change their socially relevant traits. In Study 1 (N = 60), high school students were assigned to an incremental-theory-of-personality or a control condition and then given a social-stress task. Relative to control participants, incremental-theory participants exhibited improved stress appraisals, more adaptive neuroendocrine and cardiovascular responses, and better performance outcomes. In Study 2 (N = 205), we used a daily-diary intervention to test high school students' stress reactivity outside the laboratory. Threat appraisals (Days 5–9 after intervention) and neuroendocrine responses (Days 8 and 9 after intervention only) were unrelated to the intensity of daily stressors when adolescents received the incremental-theory intervention. Students who received the intervention also had better grades over freshman year than those who did not. These findings offer new avenues for improving theories of adolescent stress and coping.
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